How to help your child improve eye contact

Hi Everyone!

Todays post is going to be about eye contact. Do you see your child or student has a hard time looking people in the eye? Don’t worry because this is a skill that can be improved!

The ability to look at and focus on people is important in our personal and professional relationships and helps people feel connected and understood. When we are talking to a colleague, boss, friend, spouse or partner eye contact is one way we show them that we are listening and that we care.

Eye contact can start to develop for children at around 3 months when they start to focus on faces and close by objects. By 6 months your child should be making eye contact for at least a short amount of time.

Eye contact is important for a few reasons

1. because it helps children develop social skills. Eye contact helps build attachment and relationships between babies and caregivers. This helps lead to lifelong emotional health.

2. It helps motivate children to learn. Babies (and people of all ages honestly) learn by tuning in to the world and expressions of those around them.  When a baby does a new activity for the first time such as sitting up our smiles and applause helps them keep going.

3.Being able to make eye contact helps them focus on what is being taught to them. It is hard for children to learn if they cannot see what is being taught and what we are trying to show them.

The younger and more naturally we teach children skills he easier it is for them to use them naturally as they grow

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One thing to keep in mind is that Eye contact doesn’t necessarily mean someone is just staring at you because of course that is uncomfortable. what we want is that natural glancing up at you-this is called referencing when they play and glance at you then play some more and look up to see that you are involved in what they are doing.

In general the more naturally something can be made part of a childs skills the better. which is why play is a great way to teach eye contact versus directly saying look at me. We want the learning to come from within the child as much as possible as opposed to them needing someone to tell them to look.

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When we work on eye contact there are a few things to keep in mind.

We want to figure out what is making the eye contact difficult:

is it that they get too absorbed in an activity to focus?

Is it too overwhelming for them to focus on looking at you and listening at the same time?

Are they just feeling shy?

Understanding what is happening with our child can help us figure out the best way to work on any skill.

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Here are some general tips to keep in mind when working on eye contact:

• When we work on eye contact we want to make sure it is it done in a way that is not too overwhelming because that can make it even harder for the child to focus so were going to want to keep our volume low and not use too many words. And when they do look at us it is helpful to keep up the low calming tone for certain kids.  Some kids will need things calm and quiet to look and some kids will need things to be extra exciting to look. The way to figure that out is just to try and see what works best.

• Keep it motivating-use exciting and fun activities to really catch them. This can be a fun toy, silly voice, songs, or a surprise such as peek a boo. Its important that you work with your style so that what you do is natural and genuine for you. Meaning if silly voices are not your things go with peek a boo. While it is great to step out of your comfort zone it is also important to be realistic about what you will do consistently so do what comes naturally. Your child loves you for who you are!

• Make sure you are leaving your child time to absorb and process what you are doing. This means waiting a few seconds after you call their name or show them something to give them time to respond. A good way to do that is to count to 5 or 10 in your head after trying to catch their attention.

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Tools to improve Eye Contact

1. One thing to do is to hold a toy right up next to your face so when the child looks at the toy it will be a lot easier to catch their eye. You can put it right next to your nose so they are looking right at you.

2.If your child is very absorbed in what they are doing Sometimes it may be helpful to go close to the child and join what they are doing for example if your child is playing with a car take the other car and crash into them which automatically includes you in what is happening.  You may want to pause and then do it again for them to look at you.

3.Another way to get into what they are doing is to imitate what they are doing.  For example if your child has a toy and is making it fly take a toy and have it fly right near them making zooming noises. This helps your child feel like you get what they are doing and you are really in the game with them which will help them look.

4.using pauses can be a very powerful tool.  Blow bubbles or use some other toy that your child loves and and wait until they are  super into it and pause until they look up at you. THen  as soon as you get the eye contact reward it by doing more of the activity right away

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6. If this doesn’t work right away that’s ok! I find that consistency really helps. Keep trying because this is a process!

It is very important to make realistic  goals for yourself that you can really incorporate into you busy routine. For example committing to work on eye contact for 5 minutes twice a day for two weeks and see from there. This will help make things manageable for you!

Here is a summary of our main points:

1.keep it low and slow-we don’t want to overwhelm with loud volume or too many words

2.keep it fun-use toys, songs, or games like peek a boo

3.first try calling name and wait a few seconds

4.Then try to hold a motivating toy up

5.join them-join the activity of the child to get attention

5.Give yourself a manageable goal such as I will work on this for 5 minutes twice a day for 2 weeks and see what happens

Hope you found this helpful! Please leave comments or questions below!